Crowded waiting rooms, stressed medical staff, and time pressure during diagnostic examinations—these are familiar challenges faced by many healthcare facilities and they require urgent attention. The Vinzenz Gruppe, one of the largest private operators of non-profit healthcare facilities in Austria, is committed to expanding its digital patient portal to meet the ever-increasing demands.

“My personal health history has shown me how valuable it is to be able to talk with my trusted doctor in a secure digital setting. […] This offer has really made life a lot easier for me at a difficult time,” Gaby Pramberger says. Pramberger is one of the 70 patients of the Vinzenz Gruppe who was surveyed about the digital patient portal ‘Hallo Gesundheit’ (‘Hello Health’) for its further development.

The new digital health application supports and accompanies patients during their medical care, empowering them to play an active part in their own treatment plans.

After all, it should be the patients themselves who benefit most from digitalization in healthcare. The eHealth patient portal does more than just remind the patient of their next doctor’s appointment; it also facilitates digital consultations, reliably processes individual health data, and offers additional medical information.

This is a development that patient Gaby Pramberger strongly approves of: “You don’t feel left alone. I can also contact and communicate with my doctors from home. […] This way, I avoid unnecessary stress, long trips to appointments, and full waiting rooms.”

A blueprint for digitalization

Virtual healthcare platforms are nothing new, but those that exist are rarely as well thought out as the ‘Hallo Gesundheit’ portal, which is designed to relieve pressure and stress for patients and medical professionals alike. The Vinzenz Gruppe’s vision was to offer some of their services in digital hybrid format in order to provide medical care that was no longer dependent on a specific time or location.

“Digitalization in the healthcare sector must be geared to people’s needs. For our healthcare professionals, we want to reduce their workloads and stress. For our patients, we want to enable more self-empowerment with our digital health platform,” says Dr. Michael Heinisch, CEO of the Vinzenz Gruppe, about the idea behind the concept. But how exactly does it work?

Development in collaboration with the users

It was clear from the word go that the patient portal had to be easy to understand and logical to use so as to cater for as many age groups as possible. The navigation had to be simple, limited to the most relevant content, and avoid using medical and technical terminology. The aim was not just to make the portal easy for patients use but also to encourage them to make the eHealth patient portal part of their own treatment path.

To make sure that ‘Hallo Gesundheit’ was really attuned to the needs of its users, over 70 patients and numerous specialists from the Vinzenz Gruppe were included in the development process from the very start. In collaboration with these volunteers, more than 130 experts from various fields developed the first models. The result of all the workshops, interviews, and evaluations was a patient portal that today makes treatment planning easier for all patients of the Vinzenz Gruppe.

Find out more about the collaboration between Vinzenz Gruppe and Siemens Healthineers here.